follow up to a poem which I like (“The next step (of course) is to request Nature With Man from the university library.”)
Moss
Jon Silkin
‘Patents’ will burn it out; it would lie there
Turning white. It shelters on the soil; quilts it.
So persons lie over it; but look closely:
The thick, short green threads quiver like an animal
As a fungoid quivers between that and vegetable:
A mushroom’s flesh with the texture and consistency of a
kidney.
Moss is soft as a pouch.
There are too many shoots, though, boxed compacted,
Yet nestling together,
Softly luminous.
They squirm minutely. The less compact kind
Has struggling white flowers; closed,
Like a minute bell’s clapper;
So minute that opened then, its stretch seems wide.
The first grows in damper places.
With what does it propagate?
Quiet, of course, it adheres to
The cracks of waste-pipes, velvets,
Velours them; an enriching
Unnatural ruff swathing the urban ‘manifestation’;
The urban nature is basemented, semi-dark;
It musts, it is alone.
Here moss cools; it has no children;
It amplifies itself.
Could that over-knit fiction of stubbed threads reproduce
Defined creatures?
It hovers tentatively between one life and another,
Being the closed-road of plants,
Its mule; spreads only its kind –
A soft stone. It is not mad.
Reared on the creeping dankness of earth
It overspreads, smears, begrudges something
Though it is passive; spreads wildly.
It is immune to nothing;
You cannot speak of misery to it.
Sikin, Jon. Nature With Man (Chatto and Windus Ltd with The Hogarth Press Ltd, 1965), 47-48.